


The Book of Love Is Long and Boring

by thelma_throwaway



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Drinking, Festivals, Love Confessions, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:15:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23371549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelma_throwaway/pseuds/thelma_throwaway
Summary: “It's not just his body, if I’m to be truthful. It is the whole of him. He doesn’t think it, but his honor is more perfect and radiant than the supple pair of buttocks he is constantly risking for the sake of others. Knows everything there is to know on this continent, except of course how to get along with others in the long term."Jaskier pines for a certain silver haired witcher not knowing just how sympathetic an ear he has found.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion/Original Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 144





	The Book of Love Is Long and Boring

_The book of love has music in it_  
_In fact that's where music comes from._  
_Some of it's just transcendental_  
_Some of it's just really dumb._

_But I_  
_I love it when you sing to me._  
_And you_  
_You can sing me anything._

_-"The Book of Love", Peter Gabriel_

* * *

* * *

In an inn, in a town, in a kingdom far from all acquaintances, Jaskier drank without joy or relief. 

The little hamlet was a week deep into a festival in honor of a deity of love, streets thick with fragrant flowers, pretty girls selling charms and elixirs, even prettier boys singing, dancing, wrestling, doing anything that might curry their patron saint’s favor. 

On every corner there were amourous sculptures carved from wood, marble, stone, even cheese, showing lovers in every type of embrace known to man, and a few known widely only among dwarves and fae. Laughter, song, and the orgiastic sounds of the best kinds of worship peeled through the town. Wine flowed freely in great fountains manned by buxom wenches, musicians wandered and played ceaselessly with pockets sagging with coin. A bard’s dream and yet---

He plucked his lute listlessly, producing a forlorn twang, and sighed. Everywhere he went, that wretched scent he could not place. 

“You look miserable,” said a comely voice, a suggestive purr hanging from each vowel. The speaker had dark almondine eyes ringed with thick lashes, a long nose with daintily curled nostrils, full lips, and a square, handsome chin. Amber curls tumbled to their elbows, held back with a red velvet ribbon. Their figure was hidden beneath their cloak, save for the slim wrists swaddled in fur cuffs and the wide-palmed, long-fingered hands wrapped around their wine cup.

“I am a man cursed,” Jaskier moaned. “Such lascivious joy all around me, all I’ve ever longed to sample and yet all I can taste is ash. Like sucking on a spent coal while desserts being served. Exquisite torture ”

“Ahh, yes,” they sighed, refilling their cup and Jaskier’s from a flask shaped like three young men in coitus. “I too grow weary of these… festivities. I take it this is your first time in Biust?” 

“Is that where we are?” Jaskier said pathetically before emptying his cup down his throat. He hadn’t any idea how he’d found himself so far south. One day he was in Vengebergg, singing for a crowd of ten score and the next--- towns he’d never heard of, innkeeps and lords who’d never heard of him. Perhaps it was a good thing. Even the feather in his cap looked depressed and he had an image to maintain. “Fitting-- considering I feel a proper tit.” 

“So it’s love that is plaguing you.” The stranger filled his cup again. “You certainly are in the right place. Where is your lover now?” 

“Not mine,” he mumbled half-heartedly. 

In Vengebergg he’d seen Geralt, trailing Yennefer like a puppy, doing her bidding, coming back again and again to be kicked or petted, depending on the mage’s mood. Nothing wilted ardor like seeing the strong, strapping object of one’s affection carrying hatboxes and haggling over bunches of belladonna. It had been too much to see the witcher drunk on love and thoroughly whipped. He’d fled without a goodbye, not that it was much noticed. He wondered if she still had the witcher collared in her stifling apartments or if she’d dumped him for a younger pet. 

The stranger waved their comely hand and sighed. “Your love, lost love, love that doesn’t belong to you, love that consumes, incinerates, slaughters. It's all the same. These fools on the street, they don’t even know  _ what _ they are celebrating.” 

“From the way you talk, it sounds as if you are an expert on the subject.” Jaskier’s patience was thinned with wine and wanting. He had no charm to offer the well-dressed stranger and it pained him somewhat. “What is your name? Or your title, at least--- so I may address you with appropriate respect.”

“You may call me Rozanika--- though I’m also called Rod, when I’m feeling macho.”

“A pleasure, m’lady.”

Rozanika shook their head. 

“A pleasure, m’lord?”

Rozanika shook their head again.

Jaskier reddened. “Apologies--- Honored Rozanika .”

Rozanika smiled and refilled their cups again. “Well, you caught on quicker than most. And were somewhat politer about it than many. And you of course, are that infamous bard--- Jaskier of Lettenhove, Lord Dandelion.”

Jaskier bowed a little, but did not take to his lute as he usually would have. The song had gone out of him. 

“I’m pleased you know me. I’m a stranger here and not a soul has recognized my name or my face but you did--- is it my hat?”

Rozanika laughed, a sound at once both tinkling and resonant. “No, not the hat. You’re quite popular among my peers.”

“Would you like to hear a tune?” Jaskier thought he might be able to drum up some musicality for the intoxicating stranger. Intoxicating indeed--- he was already half in the bag, though he did not realize it.

“No, thank you. I can tell you’re not in the mood.” Rozanika patted his hand. “Tell me a little about this love-that-isn’t-yours.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” he sighed glumly. “The muses have utterly deserted me. How can I properly describe him, that brooding, chiseled brow, that silver hair that smells of straw and sweat and-- sex! The muscles that ripple beneath his tunic, the curl of chest hair at his throat like a maddening carpet of white silk. How his trousers mold so exquisitely to his muscled rear, the ecstasy of watching candle light flicker on that luminous bottom, the shiver and ache that consumes me when he says ‘Jaskier-- stop staring and apply the chamomile’.”

Rozanika laughed again. “That is  _ lust _ , bard. It sounds like you long for his body-- and if that’s the case any body will do.”

“ _ Any  _ body most certainly will not do. He is one of a kind, truly. A stallion among men, in all ways." Jaskier winks. “It's not just his body, if I’m to be truthful. It is the whole of him. He doesn’t think it, but his honor is more perfect and radiant than the supple pair of buttocks he is constantly risking for the sake of others. He is softer with the weak and unloved than the downy hair of his chest--- oh! How I long to nestle down there. He is wise and--- and funny, too, in his own way. Knows everything there is to know on this continent, excepting of course how to get along with others in the long term. When he fights, when he fights for  _ you _ , it is poetry. True poetry, not that gaudy shite from love songs. Even mine, they cannot do him justice, cannot begin to approach it. And I have  _ tried _ , tried so hard to---”

He cut himself short, guzzled the rest of his wine. He’d come quite close to speaking that which he’d promised himself to never speak.

Rozanika sighed, leaned their cheek on one palm. “He sounds lovely, dear bard. And what keeps you two apart?”

Jaskier snorted, now well and truly sloshed. “Besides my tragic inability to share my feelings? And his own inability to understand, if proferred them? Many, many miles and a certain violet eyed mage that smells of--” He slapped his forehead, finally able to name the vile smell that had plagued him all week. “Lilac. Lilac and gooseberries.”

“ _ Tsk _ , how unfortunate that you should come to Biust at this time.” Rozanika laid a lithe hand on his arm. “When those are the exact offerings given to their---  _ ucch _ , beloved deity.”

“Do you really hate the festivities, Rozanika? Why do you linger here?” Two of the sweetly scented stranger swam in Jaskier’s vision, but he martialed them into a single visage as he did his best to sit straight on his stool. 

“I’ve been called, and  _ loudly _ . It would be rude to leave now when they’ve made such a fuss to show me respect. Not that anyone’s asked  _ me _ how I’d like to be honored. After a thousand years one grows weary of orgasmic free-for-alls and longs for…. Well, longs for what you have described, bard.”

“Me?” Jaskier’s wine sodden mind swirled and swelled, grabbing uselessly at thoughts as they floated by.  _ A thousand years?  _

“Yes. As I said, you’re well known amongst my peers. I hadn’t thought I’d run into you here, but--” Rozanika dabbed a tear from the corner of their eye. “ You’ve moved me, and I daresay that happens once only every couple of centuries or so. I’m going to repay you bard, you have earned my favor in a way all those hopeless fools with their fucking and flowers could never even begin to hope for.”

With this, the stranger took Jaskier’s face in their hands, staring deep into his unfocused eyes. Drunk as he was, Jaskier could suddenly see both Rozanika and Rod at once--- the tinkling and the resonant and everything in between. It was like staring into the midday sun and at the same time, up at the full moon, like shivering in summer and sweltering in the snow. They whispered a few words that sounded like sand dancing lithely in the wind and then pressed their lips to Jaskier’s. He returned the kiss, utterly flummoxed.

After some time (though it was unclear exactly how long) Rozanika withdrew, and said in a husky, two-toned voice, “I bless you, Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount of Lettenhove, Bard of Oxenfurt, Lover of All, with the heart and mind and radiant buttocks of your beloved. Speak his name for me, darling.”

“G-Geralt.” He stuttered as the room blackened before him. “Geralt of Rivia.”

“Then it is so.” And with this, reality fell away and the bard toppled from his chair into darkness.

\-----

Jaskier dreamt of Geralt, of the first time he’d laid eyes upon him, drinking sullenly in some shit tavern. Except this time he’d sidled up to the witcher, placed his hand on his armor clad thigh, and whispered that secret thing-- the thing he would not say even to himself except when he was feeling the most loathsome and pathetic and  _ really  _ wanted to twist the knife.

Then he kissed him. Softly at first, but with confidence that it will be returned, and with no care at all as to what kind of scene they were making. Then hungrily, his hands in Geralt’s hair, his leg over his lap, pulling him in deeper, all teeth and tongue and moans. Geralt smelled of straw and sweat and sex and he tasted of clover.

“Jaskier,” the dream-witcher growls against his mouth. “Jaskier…”

“Mmmm, Geralt!” He returns the growl, hands sliding over his chest, his arms, his thighs... 

“Jaskier!”

He woke with a start, unsure where exactly he might be and how he’d gotten there. Above him loomed the subject of his dream, of so very many dreams, still mounted on his horse and looking equal parts perturbed and concerned. Jaskier looked around, sure he was still dreaming. His sleeping quarters had been a secluded glade, his bed a patch of…. 

Jaskier spit out a mouth of half-chewed clover and discreetly checked his britches to make sure cock was not embarrassing him. Then, once sure his bulge was not visible to the witcher, raised his head and waved.

“Hullo, Geralt! Good morning, fancy seeing you.”

“Hmph.” He didn’t smile but he did dismount and offer the bard a hand up. “What’re doing here, Jaskier?”

“I’m here for the festival,  _ obviously _ . I could ask you much the same thing. Biust is a long way from Vengerbergg.”

Geralt winced at the name. “Don’t remind me. Is your business complete, bard? Or will you linger a few more days.”

Jaskier brushed his trousers off and looked about for his lute. It was nestled safely in a nearby bush. He tested the tuning pegs and gave it a strum, a lovely chord soothing his ears for the first time in weeks.

“That depends. Wither do you go, Geralt?” 

The witcher shrugged and wrinkled his nose. “Anywhere but here, I can’t stand the smell of it.”

“Yes, it's quite ghastly,” Jaskier said with a smirk. That answered his question of how things were left with fair Yennefer. “I shall go with you. To Anywhere. Believe it or not I’ve grown tired of the festivities.”

Geralt gestured for him to take Roach’s saddle and walked along beside him holding the reins. Quite unexpected. Usually they both walked and Jaskier got the sense that if Geralt could have carried the horse rather than the other way around, he’d be a happy man. 

“So how did you like it,” Geralt asked when they were a ways down the road. “It's supposed to be quite the party.” 

“It was.” Jaskier tried to remember the evening before, the night he had most enjoyed himself in Biust but he could not get the shape of it in his mind. “I think I would have liked it better if you had been with me, though.”

“I should have,” he replied wryly. “I could use Rozanika’s favor these days.”

Jaskier stared down at him, choked, and fell from the saddle.

“Jaskier!” Geralt caught him before he could land, checking him over feverishly for wounds, magical tumors, a wasp’s sting. Jaskier’s eyes fluttered open and at once Geralt felt as if he was staring into the midday moon and the evening sun. Heat spread down his neck, his back, his stomach, and legs, soon replaced by a cool shiver. He wondered why he’d never told his companion how lovely he was. 

“How did you find me Geralt?”

The witcher gulped in a very unwitcherly manner. “I… I had a dream.” 

Jaskier watched the witcher’s adam’s apple bob, his eyes widen and contract, his lips part ever so slightly. He smiled up at Geralt. 

And then he waited for his kiss. 

**Author's Note:**

> Biust= Breast (in Polish, hence Jaskier feeling the proper tit)
> 
> Rozinika/Rod is a Polish deity, encompassing the duality of female and male (though not specifically known for granting love wishes to wandering bards)
> 
> I have to say this was REAL fun to write--- I've been listening to the Witcher audio books and have been so taken with Sapkowski's writing and Peter Kenney's narration. And Jaskier's dialogue is a great excuse to jump into some purplish prose. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
